The Boss of Bosses

I've only got three words for your pick of Kingdom Hearts 2:

Dance, water, dance!

I guess while we're on the topic though, I have to say a recent example of a game that I felt did it wrong was Bayonetta. My opinion of the game only increases with each playthrough, but every time I see the bosses again, the more I resent fighting them. They're huge, epic fights...the first time. Then beating on a giant, slow moving statue of some kind or another gets boring. It boils down to the player waiting on the game to allow him or her to attack. The fights against Jeanne were much more dynamic and interesting, because it felt like the game was actually taking notice of the player, and responding to it.

I think Devil May Cry 3 was the only game of its type to get bosses right, in that they realized (outside of a couple exceptions) that a boss with the size and mobility of the player was a much more exhilarating challenge. Agni and Rudra and Vergil can still make my heart race just by watching someone else fight them. The giant bosses of Bayonetta and DMC1 played like a lecture. By contrast, DMC3 was more like a series of extremely stylish arguments.

a good boss fight IMO should leave you stoked for more gameplay, and should be a bookend that marks the end of a chapter, and further informs you that the challenge will increase. An unconventional 'boss' I'd use as an example here would be that damn airship that hounds you on the way to the underground base in the first half of Half Life 2. After so much running from it, it's a thrill to stand right out in the open ("C'mon you f***er!") and nail it with a stinger missile. Deep breath. Story section with Alex and Dog, and then you go to Ravenholm, where the play dynamic changes radically. Good times.

Heh. Demyx (the dance water guy) was actually the moment the difficulty spike set in for me. The game went from being really easy to really hard in the span of about 10 minutes.

I've only played DMC 1 and 4, but, yeah, those games didn't really have any great bosses. You're also right about the game type-I've yet to see action game in the DMC mold show me a really great boss.

That's a great one that I didn't think of. Something else that could be considered unconventional would be the horde events in Left 4 Dead/Left 4 Dead 2, especially in 2. No "boss" enemy, but a high point in gameplay all the same. The best example is probably the roller coaster in Dark Carnival.

There was a fairly long section on unconventional bosses that I took out, so thank you for giving me an excuse to mention it :)

I can't describe the gameplay because I don't remember it, but the last boss for Ghouls N Ghosts (played it for the Master System) left me a impression when I was a kid.

The twist for the last boss of the original Quake. After hours shooting the damn thing, you realize that the answer is quite simple.

All the bosses of No More Heroes. I was expecting that same wackiness in Bayonetta and I'm a little disappointed. I still haven't finish the game, though.

And a special mention to the pure spectacle of the lake monster of RE4.

(I'm guessing this will be posted with the recaptcha code as the name. ckzatwork here.)

Morpheel aside, I thought the bosses were the best thing about Twilight Princess. I particularly liked the spider-man esque fight against the dragon in the second to last dungeon.

And I agree about Kingdom Hearts 2. I remember being pretty thrilled chasing the hyenas through the elephant graveyard. And the final boss was cool - even if I had no idea what the hell I was doing (just mash that X button!)

The only one in Twilight that I liked was Zant-couldn't stand the rest. They were all just big targets with a USE THE THING YOU GOT IN THIS DUNGEON HERE signs hanging on their weak points.

I found the one against the dragon that you mention to be particularly problematic, since (playing the Wii version) a slight movement of the controller would make the auto-targeting to look at the pod behind me instead of the one in front, causing me to swing right back into his fire. That got annoying pretty quick.

The difficulty with designing good boss battles is that they have to make the player feel threatened. You can only go so far towards this with graphics, visuals, or foreshadowing about the upcoming boss battle - when it comes to it, the player has to feel that there is a risk of losing progress they have made in the game.

The basic model is - lose the big battle at the end, and you have to do the stage over, or at least start at the last save point.

Loss of progress can be internal to the boss battle itself, especially if it's a multi-stage fight. MMOs are a good example of this sort of model - 'we breezed through stage one with no deaths, but then everyone just stood in the fire on stage two.' Or, 'Jaquio's second form in Ninja Gaiden 2 is insane. How am I going to learn it when I still have trouble getting through the stage with enough health to kill his first form?'

Another risk of lost progress comes in terms of the resources you need to use during the battle. In Megaman, obviously, you need to conserve your special weapons and even stop to farm enemies if you don't have enough of weapon that works well on a particular boss. So there's pressure to perform well.

The best example of limited resources I've seen so far has been in the DS Remake of Final Fantasy IV. If you try to play it modern-rpg style, walking through dungeons without excessively farming monsters, the game stays quite challenging. Typically in bad JRPGs that don't spend the effort to balance difficulty, you can just buy more supplies than you will ever use, after finishing the first dungeon. But in this game, stuff is too expensive to stockpile. I found several bosses where I was really put over a barrel by status effects that I couldn't afford to cure, making it a very tense, dynamic experience.

Looking back, the first Lunar had some standout boss battles too, though the threat was usually more about enduring long fights on limited health item supply.

Another interesting idea you'll mostly find in JRPGs is the 'unwinnable boss battle.' The idea is to deflate the player's ego a bit and make them worry that future boss battles might not be winnable either. It can be very effective, but has been done so many times that it's not a sure thing.

Pen and Paper RPG players can understand the point of the too-difficult boss encounter - sometimes the player just needs to be shown that no matter how much their character has developed, they can't just walk all over every encounter; sometimes they need to run, or use stealth, or call in backup, or talk their way through the situation.

Video games are just starting to offer this degree of interactivity in dealing with encounters that are too difficult. Sandbox games typically love the idea of multiple approaches to solving a problem, so they show promise, but generally they don't make the problem itself difficult enough to force the player to be creative. Even when there is a 'creative solution,' it's usually so scripted by the game designer that it doesn't really involve the player thinking, but just going along for the ride.

I think balancing difficulty is key to making a game interesting and immersive, and overall difficulty usually hinges on boss fights. But on the other hand, they're sort of an anachronism - once the 'cutscene' rolls and the 'boss music' plays, there is typically no retreat. I think developers need to get a bit more creative on that front, as 'no retreat' and 'only solution is a silent duel to the death' is honestly not that common a situation in reality.

I agree that sandbox and open-world games seem to have punted on fulfilling the potential of bosses, notwithstanding technical limitations. Shadow of the Colossus is one game that actually did this quite well, but I can't think of any others that have really taken advantage of open-world bosses in this way.

Anyways. well said.

Possibly the game designers get into a mindset of 'now you will be tested on what gameplay you've mastered'..? I don't think it's a beloved anachronism as much as something that's probably just grown out of playtesting. Boss battles are choke points where the designers push the envelope of how much player input the system can handle, and get very specific about the factors that make playing difficult.

Yeah, and I totally agree that bosses work great in most games. They only really stand out to me as a weird problem with following traditional game design in games that try hard to convey realism.

Mass Effect, in particular, had a boss that seemed extremely uncanny to me, once the banter of the cut scene was over and the aforementioned duel to the death ensued. I think it was the Krogan Mercenary encounter early in the game. A sort of jarring personhood -> boss-hood transition took place.

Even outside of that sort of game, I still think shaking up the locked room duel model more often would be interesting, if an overwhelming proposition to design. Imagine a challenging opponent that has a parallel agenda on the level of the player's, who might come into conflict with them in different ways throughout the game, depending on what the AI decided would work best.

There've been 'Nemesis' type villains that show up over and over through the course of a game and at least convey an illusion of a persistent enemy. But game environments and gameplay mechanics are so complex now that the idea of an AI making large scale, long-term decisions of when and how to attack the player in something more complicated than an RTS is, for the time being, science fiction.

I get where you're going... a real ANTAGONIST. The antagonist is drawn to the same things as the protagonist, but from a different angle. Like Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark for ex. - he's not the enemy.. but he does get in the way tenaciously throughout the story... but how to implement that..?

can you really AVOID the locked room duel, without undermining whatever stake you have in what you've completed so far?

The End from MGS3 comes to mind when thinking about bosses that break the locked room scenario, but even in that case the player is still trapped in that section of the jungle until The End is dead.

The only way I can think of to truly break the locked room is to have a boss that pursues the player throughout a given area, and can be defeated at any time. Something like the hovership in the third level of Perfect Dark comes to mind, but I can't think of any others.